Firebird

I finally decided to give Firebird a proper go at the end of last week, and it was doing very very well, having become my default browser by virtue of being better and faster than full Mozilla (my previous default browser) in all but one way. That way was that Jesse Ruderman’s edit CSS bookmarklet only works in Mozilla. Being a web developer, I can hardly live without this bookmarklet anymore.

Fortunately today I found the EditCSS extension for Mozilla, which is based on the bookmarklet, but appears as a panel to the left of the main browser window (EditCSS screenshots page).

This now sits happily alongside Tabbrowser extensions, Tabbrowser preferences, Live HTTP Headers, Optimoz Mouse Gestures, Web Developer’s Toolbar, Things They Left Out and LinkToolbar (all from Texturizer) to give me the browser I want.

I’ve also installed (slightly unstable) MozPHP which lets the browser (it works in full Moz and Firebird) render PHP files without having to be served from a web server. Of course, you still need PHP installed. This is really neat. I can just point my browser at any PHP file on my hard drive and it will render the page, no having to change DocumentRoot in Apache! Installation is not quite as simple as the normal XPI point-and-click, but is still very easy (although Firebird users will either need the Things They Left Out extension or to visit the URL chrome://communicator/content/pref/pref.xul to set files with the text/php mime-type to load with Firebird). Apparently it has problems with accessing session variables, or so the site says, but I don’t care. 🙂